Shrewd Iranians Outsmarting Western Politicians By Playing On Divisions

COMMENTARY

August 4, 1987|By FLORA LEWIS, The New York Times

Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian strongman, has now provoked a scandal in France with charges that Premier Jacques Chirac urged Tehran not to release French hostages before the March 16, 1986, elections, which he won.

Chirac vehemently denies the charge. He did launch an attempt to ``normalize`` relations once he took office and made several concessions, though not enough to satisfy Tehran. Four hostages were released after he came to power, but another was taken.

It was Rafsanjani who revealed details of the U.S. arms-for-hostages deal last year. He has hinted he has more such political ammunition. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former president of Iran, knows something about it and believes he knows the motives.

Bani-Sadr, now exiled near Paris, told me Saturday that after Iraq`s invasion in September 1980, he was desperate to restore relations with the U.S. so as to buy military spare parts. ``We only had five to 10 days` supplies,`` he said. That meant negotiating release of U.S. hostages taken before he became president in January 1980. What he considered a good start was made with the Carter administration.

``But in October, everything suddenly stopped. My aides found out it was because the group in charge of hostage policy, Rafsanjani, Mohammed Beheshti and Khomeini`s son, did not want Carter to win the election. There was a meeting in Paris between a representative of Beheshti and a representative of the Reagan campaign.``

Bani-Sadr did not know their names, nor did he learn until later about an October meeting in Washington of an Iranian envoy with three Reagan workers, Richard V. Allen and Robert McFarlane, who later became national security advisers, and Laurence Silberman.

However, Bani-Sadr says that these and subsequent events confirm for him persistent rumors that the Reagan campaign offered arms if the hostages were not released until after the 1980 election. In effect, they were released at the same time as Reagan was inaugurated.

There is no reason to believe that Bani-Sadr is more dedicated to full candor than American witnesses at congressional hearings. He offers no firm proof of the charge.

However, arms did start going to Iran from Israel in the first half of 1981, including spare parts for Iran`s crippled American fighter planes. This came to light in the last week of July 1981, when a chartered Argentine plane crashed on Soviet territory, apparently off course on its flight from Israel to Iran over Turkey. Bani-Sadr says the Argentine load of weapons was ``the second or third shipment.`` He was ousted in a coup in July 1981, and has no direct information of what happened later.

The CIA knew about the shipments, Bobby Ray Inman, then deputy director, told me a year or so afterward. It is not clear whether Israel acted with U.S. approval or in apparent violation of its pledge not to transfer U.S. weapons without Washington`s permission.

Bani-Sadr said that when hostage negotiations broke down with the Carter administration, he warned the Ayatollah Khomeini that relations would not improve with Reagan in power, ``they will blame Iran for everything.`` He said the ayatollah replied, ``So much the better, that will bring a crisis.`` As what he calls an excuse to stall until the U.S. elections, Iran demanded a $24 billion guarantee from the U.S., dropped soon afterward.

Now, he points out, Rafsanjani, who has control of the Iranian war effort, is going for total political power, domestically as well. This was indicated in the same July 23 interview with the Tehran paper Etelaat in which Rafsanjani made his charges against Chirac. He told the interviewer that it was necessary to unite responsibility for domestic affairs just as for the war.

To achieve his aim, Bani-Sadr says, Rafsanjani needs external crises, and he suggests the massacre in Mecca was deliberately provoked to bring a crisis with Saudi Arabia as well as with the U.S. and France. ``He is like Hitler, he needs new fronts,`` he said.

``But I don`t understand why Reagan, Chirac, King Fahd play his game. They are actually helping him. It takes two to make a crisis. That`s what kidnapping and terrorism is used for, otherwise there would be no point.``

Of course, Bani-Sadr, who claims there was no Iranian-sponsored hostage- taking or terrorism during his 18 months as president, is self-serving. But he does know a lot about the mentality and inner workings of the Iranian regime, and how shrewdly it is able to play on divisions within and among Western states. If Western politicians and governments cooperated honestly, it wouldn`t be possible. We do help Tehran to outsmart us.